Did you know that your brain can get stronger across your entire life? While social relationships, nutrition, and physical activity play a pivotal role in our cognitive functions, play can also help us nurture our memory. So, how can you stimulate your brain daily? Which games should you choose?
Unlock Your Brain with Games!
While playing helps keep our brains healthy over the long term, it also reduces the risk of developing, with age, a brain degeneration-related condition, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease in particular.
Puzzles, riddles, crosswords, but also pétanque or juggling, discover why playing these games is excellent for keeping our brain in good health.
Riddles and Brainteasers
To stimulate your brain in a playful way, nothing beats brainteasers! In addition to intriguing and entertaining you, they will train your cognitive functions extremely effectively.
Get yourself a book of riddles and try to solve a few each day. Don’t hesitate to share them with your family so you can reflect together.
If you can’t find the answer, try thinking about it again at bedtime, because that’s sometimes when solutions jump into view.
Puzzles
Puzzles have numerous benefits for our brains. They’re not just for children! Many studies have highlighted the positive effects of puzzles on cognitive functions. They notably help improve short-term and long-term memory, cognitive flexible, as well as mental rotation and visuospatial perception.
Concretely, when we do a puzzle, we significantly enhance our brain, visual, and spatial skills while relaxing.
Indeed, the puzzle is also a wonderful anti-stress activity, perfect for finding calm.
Crosswords or Sudoku
To improve cognitive abilities, logic games like crosswords or Sudoku can be useful. They’re even strongly recommended to help older adults stimulate their brain functions. But anyone can dive in, regardless of age!
Because while crosswords boost our verbal skills by exercising spelling, verbal reasoning, and writing, Sudoku, on the other hand, helps us work on logic and our spatial and numerical reasoning. So you’d be wrong to skip them!
Fun and easy to drop into a bag, you only need a few minutes a day to train your brain effectively.
Juggling and Magic Tricks
To improve procedural memory, that is, the implicit long-term memory that enables automatic motor skills (the automaticity of certain movements, notably), certain types of games can be very interesting. This is the case with juggling, for example.
Practice every day for a week. Once you’ve mastered juggling three balls, try another effective training method also for working this type of memory, such as magic tricks or even playing a few chords on the guitar or writing with your non-dominant hand…
Chess or Checkers
If you recently watched the amazing series The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, you might have wanted to give chess a try as well. And you’d be right, because it’s a very complete game that engages both hemispheres of the brain. Just like checkers, chess helps develop spatial reasoning, but also problem-solving, planning, anticipation, and deduction.
Don’t hesitate to introduce your children to chess from a young age (possible as early as 5 years old) to share great family gaming moments.
Pétanque or Finnish Skittles
The sunny days ahead are also a chance to test outdoor games that will exercise your brain. On the menu, pétanque or Finnish skittles (Mölkky), perfect for training visuo-motor coordination—the precision of your throw—, but also procedural memory and working memory thanks to keeping score.
Cold Case Files Game
Solve mysteries and brain-teasing puzzles with Masters of Mystery kits while sharpening your creative thinking. The game series helps you spot puzzles and clues to solve them together while learning to think critically and logically. Develop your problem-solving skills and expand your knowledge of crime-solving techniques. Have fun and challenge yourselves while solving the masters’ mysteries.
That’s a great way to have family fun all summer long!
